No Arabic abstract
Human impedance parameters play an integral role in the dynamics of strength amplification exoskeletons. Many methods are used to estimate the stiffness of human muscles, but few are used to improve the performance of strength amplification controllers for these devices. We propose a compliance shaping amplification controller incorporating an accurate online human stiffness estimation from surface electromyography (sEMG) sensors and stretch sensors connected to the forearm and upper arm of the human. These sensor values along with exoskeleton position and velocity are used to train a random forest regression model that accurately predicts a persons stiffness despite varying movement, relaxation, and muscle co-contraction. Our models accuracy is verified using experimental test data and the model is implemented into the compliance shaping controller. Ultimately we show that the online estimation of stiffness can improve the bandwidth and amplification of the controller while remaining robustly stable.
This paper aims at solving mass precise peg-in-hole assembly. First, a feature space and a response space are constructed according to the relative pose and equivalent forces and moments. Then the contact states are segmented in the feature space and the segmentation boundaries are mapped into the response space. Further, a feature-based compliance control (FBCC) algorithm is proposed based on boundary mapping. In the FBCC algorithm, a direction matrix is designed to execute accurate adjustment and an integrator is applied to eliminate the residual responses. Finally, the simulations and experiments demonstrate the superiority, robustness, and generalization ability of the FBCC.
This paper describes an adaptive method in continuous time for the estimation of external fields by a team of $N$ agents. The agents $i$ each explore subdomains $Omega^i$ of a bounded subset of interest $Omegasubset X := mathbb{R}^d$. Ideal adaptive estimates $hat{g}^i_t$ are derived for each agent from a distributed parameter system (DPS) that takes values in the scalar-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space $H_X$ of functions over $X$. Approximations of the evolution of the ideal local estimate $hat{g}^i_t$ of agent $i$ is constructed solely using observations made by agent $i$ on a fine time scale. Since the local estimates on the fine time scale are constructed independently for each agent, we say that the method is strictly decentralized. On a coarse time scale, the individual local estimates $hat{g}^i_t$ are fused via the expression $hat{g}_t:=sum_{i=1}^NPsi^i hat{g}^i_t$ that uses a partition of unity ${Psi^i}_{1leq ileq N}$ subordinate to the cover ${Omega^i}_{i=1,ldots,N}$ of $Omega$. Realizable algorithms are obtained by constructing finite dimensional approximations of the DPS in terms of scattered bases defined by each agent from samples along their trajectories. Rates of convergence of the error in the finite dimensional approximations are derived in terms of the fill distance of the samples that define the scattered centers in each subdomain. The qualitative performance of the convergence rates for the decentralized estimation method is illustrated via numerical simulations.
The natural impedance, or dynamic relationship between force and motion, of a human operator can determine the stability of exoskeletons that use interaction-torque feedback to amplify human strength. While human impedance is typically modelled as a linear system, our experiments on a single-joint exoskeleton testbed involving 10 human subjects show evidence of nonlinear behavior: a low-frequency asymptotic phase for the dynamic stiffness of the human that is different than the expected zero, and an unexpectedly consistent damping ratio as the stiffness and inertia vary. To explain these observations, this paper considers a new frequency-domain model of the human joint dynamics featuring complex value stiffness comprising a real stiffness term and a hysteretic damping term. Using a statistical F-test we show that the hysteretic damping term is not only significant but is even more significant than the linear damping term. Further analysis reveals a linear trend linking hysteretic damping and the real part of the stiffness, which allows us to simplify the complex stiffness model down to a 1-parameter system. Then, we introduce and demonstrate a customizable fractional-order controller that exploits this hysteretic damping behavior to improve strength amplification bandwidth while maintaining stability, and explore a tuning approach which ensures that this stability property is robust to muscle co-contraction for each individual.
Phase Shifting Transformers (PST) are used to control or block certain flows of real power through phase angle regulation across the device. Its functionality is crucial to special situations such as eliminating loop flow through an area and balancing real power flow between parallel paths. Impedance correction tables are used to model that the impedance of phase shifting transformers often vary as a function of their phase angle shift. The focus of this paper is to consider the modeling errors if the impact of this changing impedance is ignored. The simulations are tested through different scenarios using a 37-bus test case and a 10,000-bus synthetic power grid. The results verify the important role of impedance correction factor to get more accurate and optimal power solutions.
We study distributed estimation of a high-dimensional static parameter vector through a group of sensors whose communication network is modeled by a fixed directed graph. Different from existing time-triggered communication schemes, an event-triggered asynchronous scheme is investigated in order to reduce communication while preserving estimation convergence. A distributed estimation algorithm with a single step size is first proposed based on an event-triggered communication scheme with a time-dependent decaying threshold. With the event-triggered scheme, each sensor sends its estimate to neighbor sensors only when the difference between the current estimate and the last sent-out estimate is larger than the triggering threshold. We prove that the proposed algorithm has mean-square and almost-sure convergence respectively, under an integrated condition of sensor network topology and sensor measurement matrices. The condition is satisfied if the topology is a balanced digraph containing a spanning tree and the system is collectively observable. Moreover, we provide estimates for the convergence rates, which are related to the step size as well as the triggering threshold. Furthermore, as an essential metric of sensor communication intensity in the event-triggered distributed algorithms, the communication rate is proved to decay to zero with a certain speed almost surely as time goes to infinity. We show that given the step size, adjusting the decay speed of the triggering threshold can lead to a tradeoff between the convergence rate of the estimation error and the decay speed of the communication rate. Specifically, increasing the decay speed of the threshold would make the communication rate decay faster, but reduce the convergence rate of the estimation error. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the developed results.